A data center is a facility that houses servers, data storage devices, and/or other associated components such as backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls such as air conditioning and/or fire suppression, and/or various security systems. A data center may be maintained by an information technology (IT) service provider. An enterprise may purchase data storage and/or data processing services from the provider in order to run applications that handle the enterprises' core business and operational data. The applications may be proprietary and used exclusively by the enterprise or made available through a network for anyone to access and use.
Virtual machines (VMs) have been introduced to lower data center capital investment in facilities and operational expenses and reduce energy consumption. A VM is a software implementation of a computer that executes application software analogously to a physical computer. VMs have the advantage of not being bound to physical resources, which allows VMs to be moved around and scaled to meet changing demands of an enterprise without affecting the use of the enterprise's applications.
In a software defined data center, storage resources may be allocated to VMs in various ways, such as through network attached storage (NAS), a storage area network (SAN) such as fiber channel and/or Internet small computer system interface (iSCSI), and/or raw device mappings, among others. VMs may run a finite set of operating systems along with some applications. Installing operating systems and applications may be time consuming. Accordingly, a virtualization technology called clones may be used to reduce the time in setup and to reuse already setup images.